survey feedback (was: [Theforum] anyone else have a prob with this?)

Madhu Menon webguru at vsnl.net
Fri Nov 23 22:12:23 CST 2001


At 06:20 AM 11/24/2001, aardvark opined:

>question 2 shouldn't end with a preposition...

(warning: language geek stuff ahead!)

Ah, the artificial "don't end a sentence with a preposition" rule raises it 
ugly head.
It's perfectly acceptable to end a sentence with a  preposition, as long as 
it doesn't make the sentence sound awkward or weaken it. The "rule" (a 
guideline, actually) was the work of 17th century poet John Dryden who 
tried to impose rules of Latin Grammar on English (and even accused 
Shakespeare of weakening the language). What you must avoid are sentences 
like "I know where he's at" (the correct usage would be "I know where he is").

References:
http://www.m-w.com/wftw/98sep/090898.htm
http://angli02.kgw.tu-berlin.de/lexicography/data/B_HIST_EU.html
http://englishplus.com/grammar/00000195.htm

(I *did* warn you)


>in the topical area, we have Photoshop and Gimp, am i the only
>one who thinks those are too specific?  and if not, why not things
>like DW, CS, FP, etc?

Yeah, I pointed out a few days ago that this should be separated into 
"skills" (like "logo design") and "tools" (like "Photoshop"). I've been 
trying to find an all-encompassing set of skills and tools that we could 
use, but it's not that easy. While we can try and do this for skills, 
making a list of tools would be very difficult, if not impossible. If we 
have Photoshop, we need PaintShop Pro too. How about ImageReady and Xara? 
Then we need to add programs like HomeSite, BBEdit, TopStyle, Frontpage, 
NotePad (?), and several others. This will make the form incredibly long 
and totally unusable.

I suggest we change these to generic categories like "WYSIWYG editors", 
"Bitmap graphics software" (didn't want to say just "graphics software), 
"Illustration software", etc.

Suggestions are welcome.


>i don't think "Never heard of it" should be pre-checked... people
>who choose not to do this portion will skew the results...

Nothing should be pre-checked.

Madhu

>_______________________________________________
>theforum
>smoothering your hotdog in a lot of mayo

Huh? I'm sorry, but what do hotdogs have to do with the price of fish?


<<<   *   >>>
Madhu Menon
User Experience Consultant
e-mail: webguru at vsnl.net

Weblog: http://madman.weblogs.com





More information about the theforum mailing list